Integrating Facebook, WordPress and Twitter

WordPress is fantastic, but a lot of people are using Facebook now as their portal into the rest of the web, so I thought I’d share some stuff for other bloggers I’d found on integrating the two, with Twitter too.

I’ve recently come across the WordPress plug-in WPBook. I think it’s great, and if you are a WordPress user and have a readership on Facebook too, I’d highly recommend it.

Basically, WPBook means that posts you want will be posted in full to a Facebook app, and comments that are made on FB or your WordPress site will be reflected across both platforms. This, I think, is the key reason I went for it as it can be frustrating when people start commenting and conversing on two separate sites without proper integration. Obviously this requires people to agree to using the app, so we’ll see how that goes.

Once you’ve installed it, you are guided through the process of setting up a Facebook app, which is fairly simple but requires some attention to detail – so follow the instructions carefully. Then it’s a pretty straight-forward set-up, and the settings are fairly self-explanatory.

I’ve not got a Facebook ‘page’ as such – can’t really say I like them – so I’m hoping that the App will allow people to follow this blog right from within Facebook. Be good to know how people find it.

I also use the plug-in WP to Twitter, which creates a tweet from your post, which you can fully customise within the ‘new post’ page. I also have ‘Selective Tweets‘ activated on Facebook, which means that tweets with a #fb tag are automatically posted to my wall too. Ideally I’ll be able to stop using that for actual blog posts, as people will get notifications from the app, but we’ll just see how things pan out.

Anyway, hope there’s something helpful for people – and if you’ve got a better system going, or think FB pages are better than apps, would love to hear it.